Consentacles & Consenticles

Two years ago my dear friend, Clare Bayley, made the mistake of commissioning me to illustrate an inside joke.

At the time, she was still a new friend, still in the early stages of becoming-a-friend, and I absolutely choked on drawing her idea (THAT SHE PAID FOR [Well, "donated to two charities of my choice for", if you want to be accurate]) because my idiot brain was afraid I wouldn't do a "good enough" job and then she'd have no choice but to nip our beginning friendship in the bud because I'd shat the bed so bad. I mean, that's how friendship works, right? You make an inside joke in the group chat, then you reach out to the Professional Artist in the group chat to draw it, the Professional Artist delivers a disappointing result so you SEVER ALL TIES WITH THEM.

So instead I just... didn't do it. At all. Because absolutely flaking out on a paid project is definitely better for securing a friendship than delivering an underwhelming product in a timely fashion. And it turns out I was right! Because I totally succeeded in tricking Clare into being my friend, in spite of my flagrant flakiness.

The instigating group chat discussion that started this whole endeavor was about Consentacles (tentacles that ravage the recipient consensually) which, because of a typo, developed into a conversation about Consenticles (a Hercules-esque character who consents to having his testicles touched).

Two years in, now that Clare was securely locked away into my Friendship Prison (Good luck escaping that enclosure, muahah!), I could finally start this project, because even if I did the worst job I've ever done, what's she gunna do? Not be my friend? HAHA NICE TRY, YOU AIN'T GOIN' NO WHERE.

Using Consenticles (the Hercules character) as my starting point, I leaned hard into that classic Grecian art style you find on ancient pottery. At the one end I've got the Consenta/icles dieties, with their legions of mortal worshippers lining up to get in their consensual touchin', both upon the tentacles and the testicles.

Now, what I'm showing you here is the finished product. There's a whole lot more to be said about how this piece came together, from the historical research to the evolution of how two reasonably-sized rectangle illustrations morphed into a giant fucking disk that is going to be such a pain to ship across the country, but those are stories for another blog post.

I'm real happy with how it turned out.

I hope Clare likes it too :3

But if not?

TOO BAD, YOU STILL HAVE TO BE MY FRIEND, NO TAKESIES-BACKSIES.